Like Mother, Like Daughter: the Broadheads at Marsden Woo.
Taking the Chair is the name of the current exhibition at Marsden Woo, the crafts-based gallery in east London. This is the first collaborative show between Caroline and Maisie Broadhead - the mother and daughter pair who are respectively two of the most interesting established and emerging practitioners in contemporary jewellery practice.
The seven chairs and seven photographs that make up Taking the Chair. Photo from Marsden Woo.
Although a small exhibition, Taking the Chair occupies the whole of the gallery’s main ground floor space. It consists of seven chairs and seven photographs by mother and daughter respectively. From afar the photographs look familiar. Isn’t that a Vermeer, that other a Hogarth?
Standing at a Machine. Photo from Designweek.
Well, not quite. Works such as Standing at a Machine are painstakingly produced digital creations, stage sets for the chairs that deliberately echo painterly masterpieces – in this case Johannes Vermeer’s Young Woman Seated at a Virginal. Looking closer proves that nothing is quite what it seems – from the anachronistic sewing machine in this painting to the seemingly 18th century mantelpiece in The Breakdown that turns out to be made from cardboard.
At the centre of all these works are the chairs themselves. These are mostly assisted readymades, rendered useless by puppet-like joints or thin mesh in the place of a seat and back. On the floor and wall around one chair is a line of blue tape, its contours tracing the outline of a human body that once sat on its seat.
One of Caroline Broadhead’s chairs in Taking the Chair. Photo from Marsden Woo, © Philip Sayer.
It is this chair that is most illustrative of Caroline Broadhead’s particular fascination with this otherwise everyday object; the air of absence that surrounds the empty chair. This is because the artist conceives the chair not as an autonomous, sculptural object but one only complete when it is sat on. This attention to supplementarity speaks of her studio background - a chair, just like a piece of jewellery, is incomplete without the human body.
That this show doesn’t strictly speaking feature any jewellery by these two artists is not surprising; since the 1970s Caroline Broadhead has been confounding expectations and pushing boundaries in her practice, first rejecting precious materials in favour of nylon thread, then moving to dress and performance-based pieces - all of which display the same interest in ephemerality and absence/presence as the chairs here.
Catalogue cover for exhibition of Caroline Broadhead’s work at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol November 1981. Photo from the Design Council Archive.
Although Maisie Broadhead is at the beginning of her career - this recent graduate of the RCA’s GSMJ department only held her first solo exhibition last year – she has already begun building up a reputation as a witty, wilfully cross-disciplinary practitioner. For her graduate show at the RCA she presented Jewllery Depicted, a series of Vermeer-esque photographs, in which friends and fellow practitioners are photographed wearing jewellery inspiring by the Dutch painter’s work.
Maisie Broadhead, Nipple Pinch from the Jewellery Depicted series, 2009. Digital C-Type print. Photo from Maisie Broadhead.
While in this series the chair has replaced jewellery as the inspiration, in both there is the same incorporation of modern references, and the same inclusion of friends and family. In Head to Head, based on one of the paintings in William Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode cycle, Caroline and Maisie themselves appear not once but twice.
Head to Head. Photo from Designweek.
What comes through in works such as Head to Head is not so much the theme of absence that Caroline Broadhead pursues, but rather the overwhelming presence of the artists and their family in these works, as well as the objects that make up their, and our, personal biographies. And although dependent on technological trickery, the photographs reveal a real, crafted, warmth towards the artworks from which they borrow. Finally then, this cleverly conceived show demonstrates the seemingly increasing irrelevance of the “is it art/craft debate”, and instead exemplifies the current shift towards collaboration in a spirit of post-disciplinarity and collective authorship.
Taking the Chair is on at London’s Marsden Woo Gallery until 29th October.
